Bolivia: Regions, Cities & Travel Guide

What is Bolivia known for?

Bolivia is known above all for the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on earth, which turns to a sheet of mirror in the rains. It splits its capital duties. La Paz holds the government from a canyon below the Altiplano, while Sucre keeps the courts and the colonial old town in the southern valleys. Lake Titicaca, shared with Peru, spreads across the high plateau and holds the terraced slopes of Isla del Sol.

Deep silver made Potosí one of the richest cities of the Spanish empire. The country is Andean and Amazonian at once.

Where is Bolivia?

Bolivia sits in the heart of South America without a coast, bordered by Brazil to the north and east, Paraguay to the south-east, Argentina to the south, Chile to the south-west, and Peru to the west. Its western third rides high on the Altiplano, the cold plateau pinned between two ranges of the Andes, where the plain runs treeless toward Lake Titicaca and the white expanse of the Salar de Uyuni. The land does not stay high for long.

Off the eastern flank of the mountains the ground drops through the Yungas, the steep humid slopes where the Andes fall away into cloud forest and coca terraces. Below that the country opens out. More than half of Bolivia is lowland: the Amazon basin spreads across the north in rivers, swamp, and rainforest, the Gran Chaco runs dry and thorny to the south-east, and part of the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland on earth, laps the border with Brazil.

La Paz sits in a bowl carved below the plateau, with El Alto spilling over the rim above it. Sucre and Cochabamba lie lower still, in the temperate valleys that break the western highlands. Farthest east, out on the warm plains, Santa Cruz de la Sierra has grown into the largest city and the industrial engine of the country.

From the salt flats to the rainforest the drop is enormous.

What is the history of Bolivia?

Bolivia's past begins on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where the Tiwanaku culture raised a stone city and a plateau empire that peaked long before the Inca. Its power faded around the thirteenth century. The Aymara kingdoms that followed held the high plain until the Inca absorbed them in the fifteenth century, and their two tongues, Aymara and Quechua, are still spoken across the highlands.

The Spanish arrived in 1538 and made the territory the Audiencia of Charcas. Then came the silver. In 1545 a mountain of ore was found at Potosí, and the mines there financed much of the Spanish empire while consuming the forced labour of countless Andean and enslaved workers under the mita.

Wealth flowed out; the mountain was hollowed. The long fight for independence took sixteen years and ended on 6 August 1825, when the republic was proclaimed and named for Simón Bolívar, who became its first president. The young country then lost ground repeatedly.

War with Chile in the nineteenth century stripped away its Pacific coast and left it landlocked, and the Chaco War with Paraguay in the twentieth cost it more of the south-east. A 2009 constitution refounded the state as plurinational, naming its indigenous nations as constituent peoples. The line from Tiwanaku onward never really broke.

What is Bolivia like?

Bolivia holds the strongest indigenous presence of any country in South America, and its culture is shaped from the ground up by that inheritance. Aymara and Quechua are spoken daily on the Altiplano, Guaraní down in the eastern lowlands, and the state recognises dozens of indigenous nations by name. Belief runs old and doubled.

Catholic saints share the calendar with Pachamama, the earth mother honoured with offerings at planting and mining alike, and the two traditions meet head-on at the Carnaval de Oruro, a UNESCO-listed festival where thousands of masked dancers wind up to the shrine of the miners' Virgin in the costumes of the Diablada. Food shifts with the land. On the cold plateau it leans to potatoes, quinoa, and llama; in the warm valleys and the Santa Cruz plains it turns to maize, beef, and yuca, and everywhere the salteña, a juicy baked pastry, is eaten mid-morning.

Weaving carries meaning as much as pattern, its colours and motifs marking home region and community. Markets are the living centre of town life, from La Paz to Cochabamba, stacked with herbs, textiles, and produce carried down from every altitude. This is a country of many peoples at once.

What is the climate of Bolivia?

Bolivia's climate answers to altitude more than to season. The Altiplano around La Paz and Oruro stays cold and thin-aired all year, with bright dry days and hard frosts by night, while the valleys of Sucre and Cochabamba hold a mild temperate spring most of the time. Down east it changes entirely.

The lowlands around Santa Cruz de la Sierra and the Amazon run hot and humid, drenched in the November-to-March wet season that also floods the Salar de Uyuni into a mirror. One country, every zone.

How do you get to Bolivia?

Bolivia has two main air gateways. Viru Viru International Airport at Santa Cruz de la Sierra, out on the warm eastern plains, handles the most long-haul traffic and the largest aircraft. El Alto International Airport, perched on the plateau rim above La Paz, is the highest international airport on earth, and arrivals feel the thin air within minutes.

Sucre, Cochabamba, and Uyuni take domestic flights onward. Long-distance buses climb between the regions overland, though the drops in altitude are steep.